Crunch Hype

After burning through more than $2 billion in funding, SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra has told employees that it will be shutting down operations, according to a report in The Information. Last year, the company claimed it had more than 8,000 employees globally. Menlo Park-based Katerra had already been struggling to find a viable business in […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

Since we were off yesterday for Memorial Day, today's roundup is brief, but we'll have much more to recap on Friday.

Twitter is trying to revitalize itself by adding more contexts for discourse to its repertoire. The result, if everything goes right, will be an influence superapp that hasn’t existed before.

Even as remote software uptake has boomed during the pandemic, certain workflows have gotten prioritized for specialized toolsets while other team members have been left piecemealing their productivity. Employees designing the copy that directs users and encapsulates company messaging have been particularly forgotten at times, say the founders of Ditto, a young startup building software […]

Work looks wildly different today than it did a year ago. In tech, every bit of the workplace has been tweaked to fit our new remote world. From scaling accountability and onboarding remotely to figuring out what old perks can be made socially distant — myriad decisions have been made at the hands of the […]

Collaborative software is so hot right now, but the space is also incredibly crowded. It can be hard to rise above the noise, but Coda has managed to do so with $140 million in funding and a valuation topping $600 million. So it should go without saying that we’re excited to hear from Coda CEO […]

CX can’t be thought of as a special project or the responsibility of a single function, such as user research. It needs to be a way of life.

The team at TechCrunch is preparing for another epic Startup Battlefield competition this year at Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23, and we’re assembling a superstar team of judges that will choose the winner who gets to take home $100K and the Disrupt Cup. We’re thrilled to have Venrock’s Camille Samuels join us as one of […]

Polish computational chemistry outfit Molecule.one has raised $4.6 million to expand its quest to bring theoretical drug molecules to reality. Its machine learning systems predict the best ways to synthesize potentially valuable molecules, a crucial part of creating new drugs and treatments. Molecule.one went onstage at Disrupt SF 2019’s Startup Battlefield, where they explained the […]

Autonomous robotics company Starship Technologies has a new CEO. The company on Tuesday said Alastair Westgarth, the former CEO of Alphabet’s Loon, would be leading the company as it looks to expand its robotics delivery service. Westgarth previously headed Loon, Alphabet’s experiment to deliver broadband via high-altitude balloons, from 2017. The project shut down for […]

For many early startups, debt financing is not an option. If companies want to preserve equity, however, debt can be an advantageous choice.

Ads are coming to Twitter’s version of Stories, known as Fleets. The company announced today it will began pilot testing Fleet ads in the U.S., which will bring full-screen, vertical format ads to Twitter for the first time, allowing it to better compete with the vertical ads offered across social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, […]

Convenience stores are ubiquitous – and they sell the vast majority of gas purchased by consumers in the United States. But as more Americans transition to electric vehicles, a major reason people visit convenience stores will disappear. Industry giant 7-Eleven is looking to capture this growing market of EV drivers. The company said Tuesday it […]

With American stocks back near record highs, it could be a propitious moment to list for software companies that lack impressive top-line expansion results.

The grassroots Democratic organization Indivisible is launching its own team of stealth fact-checkers to push back against misinformation — an experiment in what it might look like to train up a political messaging infantry and send them out into the information trenches. Called the “Truth Brigade,” the corps of volunteers will learn best practices for […]

If you’ve experienced parenthood, you’re well versed in the surprisingly small world of disposable diapers. Help may be on the way. Kudos, a startup that is looking to reinvent the disposable diaper with sustainability in mind, announced the close of a $2.4 million seed round of financing today. Investors include Foundation Capital, XFund, PJC, Precursor […]

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot in the world, and supply chains are no exception. A number of applications that aim to solve workflow challenges across the supply chain exist. But getting real-time access to information from transportation providers has remained somewhat elusive for shippers and logistics companies alike. Enter project44. The seven-year-old Chicago-based company […]

Max Q is a weekly newsletter from TechCrunch all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Mondays in your inbox. This week actually includes two, since I was out last week for a Canadian national holiday (and back today for the U.S. one, ironically). There’s plenty to cover, including Blue Origin’s bidding […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday Tuesday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. […]

With COVID-19 restrictions lifting and employees starting to make their way back into offices, hackers are being forced to change tack. While remote workers have been scammers’ main target for the past 18 months due to the mass shift to home working necessitated by the pandemic, a new phishing campaign is attempting to exploit those […]

The cybersecurity industry has no shortage of technology to fight against network intruders, app corrupters, email hackers and other cyber criminals. Today a startup called Redacted is coming out of stealth with a different approach to tackling that malicious activity: it applies threat intelligence, and then proactively goes after the hackers to recover data loss […]

Cloudera was once one of the hottest Hadoop startups, but over time the shine has come off that market, and today it went private as KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a pair of private equity firms announced they intended to purchase Cloudera for $5.3 billion. The company has a market cap of around $3.7 […]

Just about every week there’s a blockbuster round coming out of South America, but in certain countries such as Ecuador, things have been more hush hush. However, Kushki, a Quito-based fintech, is bringing attention to the region with today’s announcement of a $86 million Series B and a $600 million valuation. “We never thought that […]

A technical system underpinning the European Union’s plan for a pan-EU ‘digital pass’ for verifying COVID-19 vaccination or test status across the region has gone live today, with a handful of EU Member States connected to the gateway and more expected to follow ahead of a July 1 full launch. The idea for the EU’s […]

Personal finance startup Truebill has raised a $45 million Series D funding round led by Accel. This comes just a few months after the company raised a $17 million Series C. Overall, the startup has raised $85 million since its creation. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Cota Capital and Eldridge Industries are also participating in […]

Belvo, a Latin American startup which has built an open finance API platform, announced today it has raised $43 million in a Series A round of funding. A mix of Silicon Valley and Latin American-based VC firms and angels participated in the financing including Future Positive, Kibo Ventures, FJ Labs, Kaszek, MAYA Capital, Venture Friends, […]

Online fraud and identity theft is a global problem that has only been exacerbated with increased online transactions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it is estimated that Brazilian companies lose over $41 billion due to fraud every year. In an attempt to tackle this problem head on, Lincoln Ando and Raphael Melo started idwall […]

When two of Indonesia’s biggest companies — ride-hailing company Gojek and e-commerce marketplace Tokopedia — joined forces as GoTo Group last month, a key highlight from the merger was that the last-mile delivery space is still a huge global trend. In Nigeria, the e-commerce and last-mile delivery market is projected to be worth over $20 […]

Line Corporation, best known for its messaging app, launched a digital banking platform in Indonesia today. This means Japan-based Line Corp. now offers banking services in three of its biggest overseas markets: Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan. Line Corp.’s Indonesian banking platform is the result of a partnership the company struck in 2018 with PT Bank […]

Freight forwarding — the process of organising how and where items will be shipped around the world, and specifically the technology that underpins that work — continues to be a huge area of the logistics market, not least because of the huge boom in e-commerce in the last year, and because of the Covid-19-mandated need […]

The world of professional services has long relied on contractors to fill in for assignments and projects that might not be a part of the course of daily work, but are essential work nonetheless. Today, a startup that’s built a marketplace to make it easier for freelance developers, designers and others with technical skills with […]

German startup Wefox has raised a $650 million Series C funding round led by Target Global. Following this funding round, the company has reached a post-money valuation of $3 billion. Wefox is a digital insurer focused on personal insurance products, such as household insurance, motor insurance and personal liability insurance. “It’s much more than we […]

Zenyum, a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands. The round’s other participants were Sequoia Capital India (Zenyum is an alum of its Surge accelerator program), RTP Global, […]

Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp!, founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running. The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to […]

Meet June, a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on top of your Segment data. Like many no-code startups, it uses templates and a graphical interface so that non-technical profiles can start using it. “What […]

SpaceX is already underway on building its first floating spaceport platform, and the plan is for it to start hosting launches as early as next year. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared those details on the progress of its build for Deimos, one of two converted oil rigs that SpaceX purchased earlier this year in order […]

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students enrolled in overseas schools are stranded as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt life and airlines worldwide. Learning at home in China, they all face one challenge: Their school websites and other academic resources load excruciatingly slowly because all web traffic has to pass through the country’s censorship apparatus […]

There are more than 400 million Arabic speakers globally and that number isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Arabic, to most people, is a tough language even to those who speak it. According to Duolingo, someone fluent in Egyptian Arabic might not fully understand Yemeni Arabic speakers because of the vast difference in dialect. While individuals […]

Cloud kitchens are already meant to reduce the burden of infrastructure on food and beverage brands by providing them with centralized facilities to prepare meals for delivery. This means the responsibility falls on cloud kitchen operators to make sure they have enough locations to meet demand from F&B clients, while ensuring fast deliveries to end […]

Cookie pop-ups getting you down? Complaints that the web is ‘unusable’ in Europe because of frustrating and confusing ‘data choices’ notifications that get in the way of what you’re trying to do online certainly aren’t hard to find. What is hard to find is the ‘reject all’ button that lets you opt out of non-essential […]

Fintech in Africa is a goldmine. Investors are betting big on startups offering a plethora of services from payments and lending to neobanks, remittances and cross-border transfers, and rightfully so. Each of these services solves unique sets of challenges. For cross-border payments, it’s the outrageous rates and regulatory hassles involved with completing transactions from one African […]

Intel kicked off this year’s virtual Computex by announcing two new 11th Gen U-Series chips for use in thin, lightweight laptops. It also unveiled its first 5G M.2 module for laptops, designed in a partnership with MediaTek (Intel sold its smartphone modem business to Apple in 2019). Both of Intel’s new chips have Intel Irix […]

The vast majority of people in India, the world’s second most populous nation, don’t have health insurance coverage. A significant portion of the population that does have coverage get it from their employers. Plum, a young startup that is making it easier and more affordable for more firms in the nation to provide insurance coverage […]

Jai Kisan, an Indian startup that is attempting to bring financial services to rural India, where commercial banks have a single-digit penetration, said on Monday it has raised $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its business. Hundreds of millions of people in India today live in rural areas. Most […]

Delhivery, India’s largest independent e-commerce logistics startup, has raised $277 million in what is expected to be the final funding round before the firm files for an IPO later this year. In a regulatory filing, the Gurgaon-headquartered startup disclosed it had raised $277 million in a round led by Boston-headquartered investment firm Fidelity. Singapore’s sovereign […]

Compliance means that a company meets a minimum set of controls. Security encompasses a broad range of best practices and software that help address risks associated with the company’s operations.

A venture capitalist once told me candidly that whenever you see the phrase “democratization” in tech marketing material, think of it as a red flag. Democracy, generally speaking, often comes with an ironic caveat: It disproportionately benefits white and male participants. Now, you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t start off your […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.